“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

 

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 51,” Leaves of Grass (1855)

For 250 years, the United States has defined itself in terms of plurality. Its Latin motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), notes the interdependence of the multiple and the singular in our national conception.

This exhibition explores the diversity of American experience that photographs can hold, and the manner in which photographers have sought to “contain multitudes,” in the words of the 19th-century writer Walt Whitman, by maintaining an expansive ecosystem of images celebrating the contradictions of American life, culture, and history.